Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 4.djvu/446

436 was to be thrown aside, he stood by his character, and made an appeal to the House, giving at once to the debate an air of dignity which it never wholly lost:—
 * "Will you drive us to a repeal of the embargo, and make no resistance? Are you ready to lie down quietly under the impositions laid upon you? You have driven us from the embargo. The excitements in the East render it necessary that we should enforce the embargo with the bayonet or repeal it. I will repeal it,—and I could weep over it more than over a lost child.  If you do not resist, you are no longer a nation; you dare not call yourself so; you are the merest vassals conceivable. . . . I appeal to the minority, who hold the destinies of the nation in their grasp,—for they can enforce embargo without the bayonet,—I beg them, if they will not declare war, that they will do the best they can for their country."

No one then wondered to see South Carolina almost on her knees before Massachusetts, beseeching her, on her own terms, for her own honor, to do the best she could for the common country; but Massachusetts had no voice to respond. Dryly, in the caustic tone of Connecticut austerity, Samuel Dana replied that the days of ancient chivalry had not yet returned. When Massachusetts at last found a spokesman, she gave her answer through the mouth of Ezekiel Bacon,—a man second to none in respectability, but not one whom, in a moment of supreme crisis, the State would naturally have chosen among